Trump’s tariff tactic is the best way to finally make China stop cheating

China’s Communist rulers have no one to blame but themselves for the reported breakdown in trade talks with the Trump administration.

Remember last December, when President Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires to talk trade? Xi looked Trump in the eye and promised to stop cheating. Not once, but 140 times.

That was the number of items on the long list of trade complaints that US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer had submitted to Beijing months before. High on the list was the theft of intellectual property, accomplished through relentless cyber attacks against military and civilian targets and the theft of intellectual property by visiting Chinese scholars.

The tariff and non-tariff barriers that kept American products and services out of the Middle Kingdom took up another whole section, while the endless demands made upon the American companies that were allowed in to China yet another: China had a great game going. It forced US companies to partner with a Chinese-owned company, which then, after squeezing the Americans dry of their technology, squeezed them right back out of China.